Hacktivism

[MarcusAndreas]

I’m interested in people’s thoughts on the morality of hacking. I’m not thinking in the sense of stealing money from people or mindless destruction, but a more interesting question is what people think of the morality of hacktivism. This is generally politically inspired hacking, for example, if a group of people wanted to protest a group and bombarded the servers of the organizations websites for a time to temporarily disable it. I’m not convinced it is a moral action but it does warrant a discussion. This should be interesting.

 

[passus]

I’m not sure what you mean by bombarding the servers. Can you give us an example? Does that involve hacking?

 

[Catholic90]

It is like stealing or vandalism. It is wrong.

 

[OraLabora]

It is like stealing or vandalism. It is wrong.

As someone who works in IT agreed. The only morally licit form of hacking, IMHO, is in the context of controlled security testing to verify defenses against hostile hacking. Depriving legitimate owners of their right to Internet access is the equivalent of cutting someone’s phone line… vandalism. If the owner of the site is conducting illegal activities, then report them to the authorities, vigilantism has no place in ordered society.

Stealing information via hacking is just that, theft, plain and simple.

Both are offenses against the 7th commandment.

 

[Dakota_Roberts]

As someone who works in IT agreed. The only morally licit form of hacking, IMHO, is in the context of controlled security testing to verify defenses against hostile hacking. Depriving legitimate owners of their right to Internet access is the equivalent of cutting someone’s phone line… vandalism. If the owner of the site is conducting illegal activities, then report them to the authorities, vigilantism has no place in ordered society.

Stealing information via hacking is just that, theft, plain and simple.

Both are offenses against the 7th commandment.

If someone hacks into your system and leaves a log of how they did it to the IT department if they weren’t authorized to do such a thing have they done something wrong?

 

[puzzleannie]

It is stealing and vandalism on steroids and is gravely wrong and is most definitely a mortal sin with absolutely no justification, nor any useful political or social purpose.

 

[Dakota_Roberts]

I think there are good hacktivists, th3j35t3r mostly likes screwing with jihadi websites funneling would be terrorists into a few networks which makes it a lot easier for the government to monitor them.

I’d like to point out that “anonymous” DDoSs involve using computers infected with viruses to spam targets, that is in fact immoral.

 

[wynnejj]

To me, it seems a little worse than vandalism and stealing. It’s similar to climbing a telephone pole and disconnecting service to a wide group of people. Due to the size of the audience that it affects, maybe it could be categorized as mass-stealing or mass-vandalism?

 

[Dale_M]

It is like stealing or vandalism. It is wrong.

Yep. In the least damaging form, it would be like uprooting the crosses in a pro-life display. The cost is simply in the time and energy it takes to put the display back together. No point is made, other than that one side is unwilling to engage in polite discourse, preferring to express disagreement via minor crimes.

Hacktivism could do more serious damage. For example, taking down CAF for several months, and irretrievably erasing tens of thousands of messages.

And it could be worse, with valuable information destroyed or stolen.

There is no moral justification for hacktivism, or any other form of vigilante justice… You can’t do evil to produce good.